These days I’m working on re-writing my first young adult book. Behind the Eyes was initially published by Dutton in 2006 and when Dutton decided not to re-print the book, they graciously agreed to “revert” the rights to the story to me and Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic graciously bought the rights to the story. I worked on re-writing the story for a couple of years with my editor Cheryl Klein back in 2012 but I got stuck. I got lost in the writing and the editing process and the direction and unifying theme of the book got unduly complicated and confused. So I decided, with my editor’s blessing, to put this book aside and work on something new. And so I worked on The Memory of Light, the book I just finished and which is scheduled to come out in the Spring of 2016. What I’ve been thinking about as I start again on Behind the Eyes is about confidence and what it means for the writer and the writing process. I’ve been thinking about confidence because one way of looking at the previous re-writing of this book is that it was a failure. Something happened in that process that did not work. Something not good happened in my mind and on the page. I’ve been re-reading what I wrote back then and it just doesn’t sound right (although I remember sending that last version to Cheryl thinking that it was good). So you can see why the idea of confidence may have entered my mind as I contemplate what happened with this book not too long ago. What does it mean to write with confidence? I also like the word “authority” and to some extent to write with confidence and to write with authority are similar. The first thing I want to say, to get it out of the way, is that there is some pretending when you write with confidence. Pretending in the sense that I choose to write as if I had no doubts. Doubts are there, of course, but I am overriding them. I am choosing to believe that I am a good enough writer to write this story even if there’s a little voice that says that maybe I’m not. When I go in front of an audience and there is fear in me, I choose not to show this fear and instead I choose to present a person who is calm and comfortable with his subject matter. If this choosing to act one way when there is a part of you that feels different is like pretending than so be it. To write with confidence is to pretend that you are good enough to write this story. And as C.S. Lewis said of faith, one starts by acting as if one believes and ends up believing. Because confidence in writing, like faith, is something that comes, that happens in the doing. The “acting as if” opens the door to your heart so that the grace of belief can enter. There’s something else about confidence that strikes me. As I write I’m aware of the rules of writing, of the accepted precepts that make the kind of book I’m writing readable and interesting to young readers. But confidence takes those precepts and gives them a unique twist, a twist that comes from me, from who I am as a person and as a writer. Confidence allows me to take risks, to challenge myself, to surprise myself. (And it is in taking risks that I gain confidence) And if I surprise myself and discover new characters, new ways of saying something, then maybe my readers too will be surprised and will share in my joy at finding something new. Finally, I keep in mind, that confidence is not arrogance. My “failure” in the writing this same book is still in my mind. The confidence I seek is founded on humility. Humility is that middle-way between thinking you’re worth more than others and thinking you’re worth less. Humility, like confidence is knowing you’re good enough to write this story.
April 25, 2015
May 11, 2014
The Diversity Discussion
Now and then I get asked to talk to about the need for diversity in young adult literature. These days, when the need for diverse books is being so prominently discussed, I have tried to understand why these talks are so hard for me. I have the sense when I show up that there’s nothing new I can say. Doesn’t everyone already know how vital is to for a young person to see him/herself in the books he/she reads? Isn’t it obvious how much we need all young persons to see how we are all the same deep down? Surely, everyone understands how empathy, how living in the mind and life of another, destroys racial and ethnic stereotypes. What more is there to say about the need for diverse books? So I talk about my birth in Mexico, my crossing to the United States when I was nine, my growing up in El Paso Texas, to explain why I naturally write about young Mexican-Americans. My characters are good role models, I think, despite (or because of) their human frailties. I’m sure their existence has helped kids, Latino and non-Latino, to understand themselves and others, but do I really have profess out loud that this is one of the reasons I write? Can I just say that I write about Latino kids because that’s what comes out? Ismael, Hector, Marcelo, Pancho, Vicky, they are just there, first as small seeds and then they grow slowly over the years in my mind and then they are born. I’m just the Stork here. I don’t create my characters. I simply deliver them. And sometimes, the characters that I deliver are white kids like D.Q. and Wendell and, I confess, I don’t do a lot of research about their culture to make sure I get them right.
These talks are so hard because there’s so much about what is being discussed that I don’t know. I’m just trying to write some stories. To a lot of the questions that I get at these talks I have to say, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Why aren’t there more books about and by Persons of Color being published? I don’t know. The literary agents and the publishers and editors I personally know all love good diverse books and they go out of their way to find them. Some of them, as was (and is) the case with me, are willing to spend the effort and time needed to develop a book with potential into a good book. Is it a question of money, then, as so many seem to say? POC books don’t sell. I don’t know. My wife had a group of her Wellesley College students over to the house for lunch and I asked them: Do you think the Harry Potter books would have been less popular if Harry had been a Person of Color? The white students mostly said no, the Latino kids said yes. I don’t know. And if J.K.Rowling decided to re-publish her series but this time Harry’s parents were African, what else would she need to change besides Harry’s skin color? His speech? The way he thinks? Would he still be brave? So much of the diversity discussion is, ironically, divisive. Us. Them. You can’t possibly understand. Ironic because what good literature does best is unite by revealing glimpses of the soul that is the same in all. In the end, it comes down to you and me. What can I do? What can you do so there are more good diverse books written and read? That’s what I end up saying at my diversity talks. What I Francisco Stork can do is try to write good books, try to write books that will last, try to write books with the kind of characters that come naturally to me, that are in me waiting to be born, try to write books that speak to all. I can encourage kids of color to work seriously, patiently, at the craft of writing. I can, time permitting, help young writers with their manuscripts. And maybe, I’m not sure about this at all, but maybe, I need to keep on talking to groups, hard as it is, about the need for diverse books.
December 1, 2013
Loving Your Characters
A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a lecture on character development at a writing workshop. I spent a lot of time talking about the “Iceberg Theory” of character development – that the main work involved in developing characters takes place outside of the written page, in the hours and days the author spends imagining the characters in his or her mind. This “below the surface” work is long and arduous and painful. In other words, it is a lot like learning to love another person. Here is an excerpt from that lecture, revised a little, to add some thoughts that came to me since then.
Loving your characters may seem at first like an abstract concept, a concept that authors toss around whose meaning like the word “love” itself has been lost through overuse. But I want to tell you that for me love of a character is real and is more important than any technique we may learn about how to create realistic characters. Love for a character includes many of the qualities of the kind of true, mature love that we experience in real life. On a basic level, to love your character is to like them, to like spending time with them, to find them interesting, to be patient with them and be willing to continue imagining them until they reveal themselves to you completely, until you know them as fully as one can know another, inside and out, body, mind and heart. As in the real world, love increases the more you get to know and understand the other. As in the real world, character love involves a respect for the individuality and autonomy of the other. As in real life, careful listening is needed. Who is this character telling you he or she is? As in life, character love means you will put the interests of the character above your own and you will not treat them as a means to an end. You don’t have sufficient love if your character is simply there to represent an idea or a type or a mental condition or is simply there so you can manipulate the emotions of the reader. Of course characters are only a part of the greater whole which makes up the world of the novel. But to love your character is different from loving your plot or your setting. There is something about loving your character that makes them distinct and independent and that touches you in a way different, more personal, that any other aspect of your novel. Loving your character hurts because it sometimes happens that to love them you first need to love a part of yourself that is embodied in your character. It is love that makes you want to know your character deeply even if you know that what you discover might be painful. It is through love that you discover your character’s uniqueness and in love that you understand and accept that character’s humanity, flaws and all. And finally it is love that guides you in how you present that character to the readers so that they too might share in the understanding and compassion you’ve developed for your character, in your awe at your character’s complex concreteness, in your love.